About sports scribes and math…to trade Jacob Trouba or not…fresh faces at the Freep, none at the Sun…homegrown star power for Jets…Grandpa Simmons…and other things on my mind

I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

Today, kids, we’re going to do some math. Simple math.

You will learn that the number zero really is the number zero, except in the minds of sports scribes who would have us believe that the number zero is actually of greater value than the number 47.

Let’s begin…

Since the inception of the crossover playoff rule in the Canadian Football League, eight West Division teams have traveled that route in an effort to advance to the Grey Cup game. Each of those outfits arrived at a dead end. Two of the eight managed to survive the East Division semifinal, but both crashed and burned in the final. Thus, crossover sides are 0-for-8. They are 0-for-life.

A couple of Winnipeg scribes believe the Blue Bombers and quarterback Matt Nichols would be better off finishing fourth.

Yet here we have two news snoops, Paul Wiecek and Ted Wyman, promoting the notion that the current edition of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers would better serve itself by securing a crossover post-season berth, rather than attempt to navigate its way through the rugged West terrain.

“If the 8-6 Bombers do slip to fourth place in the West,” Wyman writes in the Winnipeg Sun, “they still have the inside track on a crossover playoff spot and that would actually make their post-season road easier.”

“The team that finishes fourth in the West Division this year will have a lot better chance of playing in the Grey Cup than the team that finishes third, or maybe even second, in the West,” Wiecek writes in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Really? Well, let’s do the math.

The crossover rule as we know it began in 1997. As mentioned, eight West Division outfits have been down that path. They are 0-for-8. That’s a success rate of 0 (zero) per cent. In that same time frame, nine second- or third-place clubs in the West have either played in, or won, the Grey Cup game. That’s a success rate of 47.3 per cent.

I’m uncertain where Wyman attended school, but I know Wiecek is a product of St. Paul’s High and I doubt the Jesuits taught him that a 0 (zero) per cent success rate is superior to 47.3 per cent.

The numbers don’t lie. They tell us it’s actually more difficult for a crossover West Division team to do its grunt work on the eastern side of the Manitoba-Ontario border. The moral of the story: The Bombers should be shooting for second place, not fourth.

But, hey, why would writers want to let facts get in the way of a flimsy premise?

For the record…

Just wondering: Given that Jacob Trouba is refusing to report for Winnipeg Jets training exercises, do we now describe him as a stay-at-home defenceman? It certainly gives literal meaning to the term.

There must be something foul in the drinking water at the Winnipeg Sun. I mean, Ted Wyman didn’t stop at telling us that the Bombers are better off heading east even though history confirms that it’s a fool’s play, he also goes to great lengths to tell us why the Jets absolutely cannot, at any cost, trade Jacob Trouba. Apparently, it would set some sort of nasty, dangerous precedent. Before signing off, however, Wyman submits that the National Hockey League club “shouldn’t trade him now. A least, until it’s on their own terms.” I see. You can’t trade him but you can trade him.

The loss of football scribe Ed Tait to the Bombers website was a large blow to the Freep toy department, but the work of young Jeff Hamilton has cushioned the blow considerably. He’s good. The loss of Gary Lawless to TSN might have been impactful if not for his replacement in the main columnist’s chair, Paul Wiecek, who is no less opinionated and a vastly superior writer. Many readers don’t embrace Wiecek’s sometimes grating style, but that’s only because they prefer that he wave pom-poms. Sports editor Steve Lyons, meanwhile, has also added cops-and-robbers guy Mike McIntyre, Jason Bell and Mike Sawatzky to his stable of scribes at the Drab Slab to more than offset the departure of veteran Tim Campbell, a solid reporter but a bland wordsmith.

I keep hoping for some fresh faces and voices to deliver some oomph to the tabloid in town. Ted Wyman, Kirk Penton, Ken Wiebe and Paul Friesen fight the good fight for the Sun, but the cast of thousands from hither and yawn in the sprawling Postmedia empire leaves me cold. It would help if Friesen’s column appeared more than twice a month. Opinion is supposed to be a major part of the Sun’s personality. So let’s have it. Get Friesen back up and running on a regular rotation, and get another local voice willing to rattle some cages.

Read a piece by Damien Cox in the Toronto Star the other day. The article was a yawner, but he made at least one interesting point: “As both the original Jets and Jets 2.0, they’ve never really had a hometown star.” At first blush, I thought, “That can’t be true.” Then I did a roll call. Ted Green, Joe Daley, Ab McDonald, Perry Miller, Bob Woytowich, Jordy Douglas, Randy Gilhen…closest to a homebrew star would have been the Seed, Teddy Green, even thought he was at the tail end of his career when he arrived to help the Jets win two World Hockey Association titles.

I note that the Edmonton Oilers have a furball mascot named Hunter, a Canadian lynx. The Oilers tell us that Hunter is the first mascot in team history. And here I thought that Dave Semenko was their first mascot.

You cannot doll up the World Cup of Hockey. You can tweak it all you like for 2020, but it is what it is. And here’s what it is: They’re playing for bragging rights. Whoop-dee-do. Whereas the intrigue of the political arena (read: Cold War) spilled over into the hockey arena in best-on-best tournaments during the 1970s and 1980s, no such climate exists today. Intrigue fueled the passion. Now, we can’t even marshal up a genuine hate-on for the Americans, not even when Torts is going off his nut. We just feel sorry for the people who have to play for him.

Well, Steve Simmons is doing his Dear Ann and Dear Abby thing again. In August, you might recall, the Postmedia columnist was telling golfer Brooke Henderson she needed to “grow up” because she skipped out on an interview or two. Now, it’s Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Marcus Stroman who “seems like an annoying kid who needs to grow up just a little.” Henderson is 19. Stroman is 25. We all had growing up to do at that age. Simmons has become that cranky, old neighbor who kicks the kids off his front lawn when they climb the fence to retrieve their baseball. Leave the young’uns alone, Grandpa Steve. The kids are alright.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing about Winnipeg sports for 46 years, longer than any living being. Do not, however, assume that to mean she harbors a wealth of sports knowledge or that she’s a jock journalist of award-winning loft. It simply means she is old and comfortable at a keyboard (although arthritic fingers sometimes make typing a bit of a chore) and she apparently doesn’t know when to quit. Or she can’t quit.
She is most proud of her Q Award, presented in 2012 for her scribblings about the LGBT community in Victoria, B.C., and her induction into the Manitoba Sportswriters & Sportscasters Association Media Roll of Honour in 2015.

2 thoughts on “About sports scribes and math…to trade Jacob Trouba or not…fresh faces at the Freep, none at the Sun…homegrown star power for Jets…Grandpa Simmons…and other things on my mind”

Hmm, didn’t know about Campbell leaving Socialism Illustrated. Perhaps he made the mistake of letting his Liberal Party membership lapse. A year after interviewing me for a piece on the Fighting Moose, he took a thinly veiled potshot at me in a column. I can accept criticism, but he was way off-base and I addressed it in my book on the Fighting Moose.